If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Hybrid View

Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit - Buffer Overruns

Over the last few months there has been a large increase of buffer
overflow vulnerabilities being both discovered and exploited. Examples
of these are syslog, splitvt, sendmail 8.7.5, Linux/FreeBSD mount, Xt
library, at, etc. This paper attempts to explain what buffer overflows
are, and how their exploits work.

Ive been reading alot of articles recently (well, all the time) and i found this one. Not sure the age (or the current relevance because of little knowledge on the programming side of the topic ) but it has shown me alot about buffer overruns and the concepts behind exploiting them.

`smash the stack` [C programming] n. On many C implementations
it is possible to corrupt the execution stack by writing past
the end of an array declared auto in a routine. Code that does
this is said to smash the stack, and can cause return from the
routine to jump to a random address. This can produce some of
the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind.
Variants include trash the stack, scribble the stack, mangle
the stack; the term mung the stack is not used, as this is
never done intentionally. See spam; see also alias bug,
fandango on core, memory leak, precedence lossage, overrun screw.